“It was yet to me all a wonderful dream, from which each moment I dreaded awakening.  It was all so beautiful!

“I sat again with Chapman under the canopy, talking of the earth.  Strange Mystery!  Here we were with our earth memories yet vivid, recalling incidents of life in New York City, and summoning amid all the appealing charm of this strange new life, the little, sordid variances and trials, vexations and minor sufferings that had marred his own life on earth.  We turned to these things, not because they were grateful or pleasing to remember, but because it seemed to establish us, or rather me, to give me identity, and build up the growing certainty that I had come from the earth, and was re-embodied in this new sphere of active feeling and experience.

“I told him of you, of the death of your mother, of our flight to New Zealand, our experiments, the Dodans, and then turning to him, as we saw the Martian moon rise in ruddy fullness far away over the hill of Tiniti, I said, searchingly:  ’Chapman, you remember Martha?  How beautiful and good she was!  I have kept one long, sad, and still deathless hope in my repining heart.  I shall see her again!  It must be!  I have felt so certain of this that no argument, no appeal to reason, can drive away the keen sense of its realization.  Have you seen her on Mars amongst the thousands you have met, and is there on this entrancing orb any other place than the Hill of the Phosphori, for the disembodied of other worlds to enter this new world?

“Chapman smiled.  ‘Yes,’ he answered, ’I remember your wife very well.  I could pick her out from ten thousand, but I have never seen her yet in the City of Light.  You may, my dear friend, cherish only an illusion, and yet I am half willing to agree with you; such intuitive feelings have a deeper philosophy of truth than we can fathom, and no laughing skepticism, no mere frivolous doubt can expel them.  Wait, my friend; it may yet be meant for you to meet her.  And now I do recall some accounts told me of occasional visitants to Mars entering its life at different points; many indeed have been received near Scandor, and on one or two occasions the prehistoric peoples, the little strong men of the mountains and the northern ice have brought in such a chance waif that has become body amongst them.  How wild and frightened they become!  And quite naturally!  Ghosts dropping out of the air becoming flesh and blood might startle a rational being into a rigid course of religious practices, not to say superstition.  But look, how fair the night has become.’

“The landscape about us was wonderfully illuminated by the two satellites, Deimos and Phobos, which, as you well know, were made known to astronomers on the earth by Prof.  Asaph Hall in 1877.  What a marvellous spectacle they presented, moving almost sensibly at their differing rates of revolution through a sky sown with stellar lights.  The combined lights of these singular bodies surpassed the light of our terrestrial moon, by reason of their closeness to the surface of Mars, while the more rapid motion of the inner satellite causes the most weird and beautiful changes of effect in the nocturnal glory they both lend to the Martian life.